This unique catalogue of multimedia art and essay works presents sixty titles from Canada, Australia, the US, Belgium and France, produced between 1995 and 2006. The collection illustrates the short but fascinating history of interactive fiction.

Changer le cours

“Turning the” ways of thinking, to meet others, perceive the world and also a way to make the video: read / write batch and user-adjustable, phrases playing a role in navigation interface , nonlinear navigation and exploration of characteristics of DVD media lounge: subtitle tracks, Multiangle video, image and interactive video …

You can see on the screen of natural phenomena related to running water over the seasons, while voice and text take us to our own individual or collective floods in true stories, slices of life, or explorations of perception. In this video, poetry, reading is interactive, we can explore without end, without departing from the movie …

Notice to the reader / viewer

This one-hour interactive video is made for everyone in this story could go on board his TV and his Zapeta orders at their own pace, according to his desire to explore. It’s very different when we take time to get yourself in a universe that is as intimate as a book and as always in poetry, the reader invents each time reading. Except that is not a book but a video where you can move. There are several codes of reading to know, just like a book is handled chapters, table of contents or footnotes page, in this video you will use the navigation icons, screens and switches hyperlinks.

This DVD contains:

* An interactive movie of poetry – duration 1 hour
* A film of poetry – duration 25 minutes
* A documentary – duration 9 minutes around the thought of Elisha Reclus – anarchist geographer death in 1905 – thinker of social ecology and precursor of geopolitics.
* The text with entries in the film, possible from the text
* Internet access on the site http://www.changerlecours.artcilab.org

In “Danser” characters cookies tell myths behavior: dancing and fighting, they end up breaking every time – they were changing the species starting over. In “dormir”, sleep three fingers in the water under the eye of a black cow, how to be human, scoured by the elements, enchanted by the world’s perception, or awakened by a cop, prey, chase or poor.

“An Exploration of the human. Drift. Links between poetic acts that exist in this world that are called real. In exploring, we will expand the boundaries of this place. A whisper in our ear. A caress of look at a rose. Cookies characters – are not porcelain dolls – fall to pieces. Fingers sleep in water, with drops as the only drum. We will clarify things better. To see clearly. ”

Switching

Switching is a different type of film that paves the way for new storytelling methods. Switching was specially developed for DVD video. The fascination with interactive expression basically originates in its potential to depict a more fragmented form of reality. The user of this film enters a narrative labyrinth simultaneously unfolding and disrupting the story. A film is now something you can change by touching it. Film has become “pliable”.

There are three element that explain why Switching departs form the linear form. The first is that the film can be changed at any time. Consequently, the user can jump back and forth in time and location. The second is the fact that interface and content are not divided; in order words, the screen has no buttons to click – the interface is transparent. The film itself is the clickable object. Accordingly, linear control and logic disappear. The third element is teh fact that the narrative is structured around a circular system in which everything repeats itself. So it has no ending. The film continues forever in its circular universe.

15 minutes d’Humanité

This title has some print and interactive CD allows the reader to access a website and to achieve their 15 minutes of Humanity. Following a residency conducted at the center AXENÉO7 in 2002, the artist Sylvie Tourangeau had met thirty people invited to share their concept of humanity.

Male or Female

Male or Female (MorF), is the eagerly anticipated project from legendary Belgian producers Daniel Bressanuti and Patrick Codenys of electronica pioneers Front 242, with musician/vocalist Elko Blijweert. MorF worked with innovative label Dance51.com (US/Canada) and DVD production leader The Pavement (UK), along with an international team of visual artists to produce the “primitive reflections twisted from sound” DVD+CD.

Video and audio clips around the character of Pixelan and the participation of artists such as Etienne Auger, Rod Chong, Nicolas Kadima. This interactive DVD tries to reproduce the phenomenon of mixing with the use of the functions of random reading of the video tracks.

Post-Audio_DVD

The POST-AUDIO_DVD project is a compilation of audiovisual projects created by Montreal-based artists. It is a testimony to a bourgeoning practice that combines sound and moving images. Though this is in no way an exhaustive presentation, it does, however propose a panorama by presenting a variety of artistic approaches that bear the singular stamp of their creators.

L’arc d’apparition

This DVD proposes a cinematographic approach combining the contemplative gaze we traditionnally fix upon a painting or a photographic still, with the dynamic responsive way we view movies. This ghostly gathering of mutable figures is the first feature-lenght picture by John Oswald, the infamous perpetrator of Plunderphonics. Includes a bonus multilingual soundtrack CD.

Chimé

Through four characters and four imaginary spaces, My Calling Figure, Walker of the Flat Tower, La Zani and La FemmeVolcan, this interactive piece on cd-rom explores, in a intimist way, the creation of personal mythologies and multples subjectivities, as questionning notions of origin, belonging and distance.

Marie Tyrell

Marie Tyrell is a fictional activist and revolutionary on death row. Based on a 1974 short story by DM Fraser, the film weaves mutiple view points. Watch the narrative drama, then click the video to interrogate the politics, authorship and production of this DVD.

Mixed Greens

A do-it yourself movie about identity, belonging and things we desire. It consists in two stories: four generations of Irish Jewish heritage played against four decades of lesbian life. With a combination of text and QT movies, Mixed Greens explores articulations of identity across sexual and ethnic lines.

Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles

Based on Norman Klein’s book, History of Forgetting, this interactive narrative combines a database detective story with a digital city symphony and a metanarrative reflection on interactive storytelling in this new medium. Set in a three-mile radius near downtown Los Angeles, the DVD-ROM explores several locations that helped shape the city’s cultural history. Includes a book, which contains a novella by cultural historian Norman Klein and essays on the production.

La collection Tom Drahos Média

Photographer, film maker and plastician, originary from Czechoslovakia, Tom Drahos revisits masterpieces from 19th century litterature through seven CDROMS reflecting a totally contemporary universe. For each one, Drahos invents a world of myhtological, symbolic, social and personnal references.

Dubref session 1

This spoken word video compilation on CD-ROM is made of 10 different audio performances accompagnied with 4 video clips, coming from both french and english sides of Montreal’s upcoming spoken word scene.

[lang_en]
Challenging the borders between autobiography, memory, history and fiction, this interactive memoir presents a diverse array of personal materials by and about John Rechy, a Chicano writer from Texas, and sets them against larger collective histories of Chicano culture and the gay world.
[/lang_en]

Histoire de la femme aux grosses mains

A woman wakes up one morning with a physical anomaly : her hands become hypersensitive, to a point where she can ‘read’ and feel the world by touching objects. Science and medecine help her to adapt to her new senses. Her hands starts to grow, she becomes the Women With Huge Hands. This CD-ROM comes with an illustrated book of poetry of which it constitutes the last chapter.

Pause

This literary and illustrated work will take you in the heart of Dominique Noblet’s life, which involves love stories, job interviews, and a mundane social life. Through multi-layered dialogues filled with contradictions, we discover the ambiguity and the power games involved in social interaction.

Les quatres saisons picaresques

Leaving. The ultimate word around which Clara builds her own universe in this animated CD-ROM. Inspired by the iconography of the road movie genre, this interactive fiction leads us through four seasons of feelings, poetry and adventure with Clara as a travelling character.

Tracing the Decay of Fiction

Based on Pat O’Neill’s 35 mmm film, this interactive fiction is an archeological exploration of the Hotel Ambassador in Los Angeles, a vintage building now in ruins. Visitors wander through the abandoned rooms encountering cultural traces of historical traumas and personal dramas that occured in the hotel.

Momentum – Fin de siècle

At the turn of the century was born an experimental theater troup called Momentum. Here are their best moments through 16 short movies taken from archives of their shows of their first decade (1990-2000) presented on DVD.

Electric Living in Canada

The project involved over 90 interviews with Canadian and international digital artists and media theorists thinking out loud about their work and its implications. The DVD-ROM features artists who work digitally in image and/or sound, or using sensors in installations, as well as in the realm of robotics. In the ELECTRICANADA section, Canadian artists comment on living and working inCanada. Also included are 3 Mediaprobe art pieces.

AUTHORS

• Creative Direction, Programming and Navigation:

James K-M

• Content Development, Interviews and Writing:

Carol Sill

PRODUCTION

Produced by Carol Sill and James K-M, with assistance from Telefilm Canada and BC Film. The ELECTRICANADA section, is coproduced with the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Phony

Phony is an interactive CD-ROM which explores the history and culture of the telephone in order to reflect on contemporary communications technologies. Based on a multisite public art exhibition by the author, Phony explores an ensemble of typical telephone situations on a dramatic mode.

AUTHORS
• Creation : Susan Schluppli

• Technical assistants : Dana Dansereau, Tess Takahashi

• Photography : Don Gill, Frank Welder

• Video actress : Adriana Kulper

• Voice over : Patrick mahon

PRODUCTION
Susan Schuppli / Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2002

Original English Version for Macintosh™ and Windows™
ISBN 1-894699-16-5

Illuminations: a book of letters

ILLUMINATIONS: A BOOK OF LETTERS is a CDROM artwork which models book form. The twenty-six ‘pages’ or screens, one for each letter of the alphabet, contains continuous loop video material, graphics, and interactive still images and text. Illuminated Manuscript meets computer technology. Science, religion and art re-merge today as in (Leonardo) Da Vinci’s times. Flaming.

A is for Apple

A is for Apple is an INTERACTIVE ARTwork that investigates a cryptography of the apple. Using an ever expanding series of associative links, the work looks for hidden meanings, coincidences and insights that stem from the apple. This leads to a vast web of references from western metaphysics, popular culture, the history of cryptography, ideas of language, and psychoanalytic theory.

Phares gamma

Liquid medias. The computer uses generative processes, based on random, which recalls Mallarmé’s Coup de dés, to the quantas’ theory and “chance operations” of Cage. PHARES GAMMA is a self generated work, infinite by nature, where words, images and sounds are posted together.

AUTHORS
• Creation: Jacques Donguy

• Images / sound / texts: Jacques Donguy

• Programmation and music: Guillaume Loizillon

PRODUCTION
Poetic exploration, french and multilingual
produced with the support of DICREAM (France)

Digital Snow

An application to explore Michael Snow’s work, as well as an educational and didactic tool, allowing you to discover the works of one of the most significant artists in contemporary art and cinema of the past 50 years. A data base with 4,800 entries and records for more than 700 documented works.

Liquidation

In the midst on a baroque city that endlessly liquidates, follow TOPO Agency’s investigation in LIQUIDATION – a random photo-novel. Pursue a detective’s steps, meet businessmen from the Corp, forgery artists, a variety star, a professor and a poet…powered by a random storytelling engine, this multimedia fiction includes over 1800 photographies and 4 hours of original music and dialogues with twenty interpreters.

Cocktails & Appetizers

Sexy photographs make good cocktail-party bitching in Cocktails & Appetizers. Max, a photographer, spends a day taking photos of Jesse. An homage to lesbian pulp fiction novels of the 50s, Cocktails is an interactive narrative about women looking at women, taking a risk, and falling in love.

El tractor

This CD-ROM offers no less than 40 minutes of full screen videos, gathered from El Tractor’s live show : domUSticks IDEOTRONs. In a live context, El Tractor (Boris Firquet, David Michaud and Fabrice Montal) improvises and constantly manipulates sounds and images in order to regenerate their works in ever changing results.

Copigraphie

This multimedia documentary CD-ROM traces the global history of the photocopy artform since the invention of the medium at the end of the 1940’s until now. Copigraphy contains 1298 visual documents from 85 artistes of 18 countries and 801 text documents : historical facts, artist’s statements, reviews and critiques, etc.

Holographie ART

A unique document in the history of holography, this first interactive encyclopedia is exclusively devoted to Holographic Art and the internationally reknowned artists who took over the scientific technique to express themselves in their own original creative ways.

Complaintes

In an ironic and cynical tone, Loîc Connanski proposes a new audio and video performance in which an atrocious singer wearing a striped shirt stands in a juke-box where he sings a list of 52 one-liners for which the user can choose 4 different musical backgrounds. As Connanski states : “At last, retarded artists finally have access to multimedia.

La cathédrale aveugle

The collected poems Les Murs des planètes open doors to a universe where words collide into powerful and troubling images. The cd rom La Cathédrale aveugle drives the reader into a visual and auditory aesthetic experience inspired by the book’s poems.

AUTHORS
• Texts, artwork and animation
Ollivier Dyens

• Music
La Compagnie musicale La Nef

PRODUCTION
Ollivier Dyens, 2001
Original French Version/ Macintosh™ and Windows™

Uncompressed

UNCOMPRESSED is an interactive film that allows viewers to choose the path that they will follow. Finding themselves in the middle of a world not far removed from science fiction, viewers become involved in a story avout human cloning. Six character’s tales are told from their own perspectives. The interface allows the audience to view the tale from any of these viewpoints and to switch between them at interaction points.

Voxelations

Voxelations: Her Voice is an interactive work featuring kinetic image and text, and sound. It is a modular work that combines photographic images of real women, and images from the media, advertising and other representations in the public domain. The interface makes use of a linear structure, based on true stories from my mother’s personal history, and lateral, dislocating links that expose the persuasivness of media images.

Act as a free person

A reflection on freedom in interactive media, where pictograms are used to navigate through a diversity of poetic, visual and question-raising multimedia tableaux. A non-linear adventure that never takes you to the same place in the same way, and where you can’t go back on your steps…

Paris réseau

Paris Network assembles photographs, sound samples, animations and texts to form a composite, layered image of the city, combining digitized traces of physical places and people with information garnered from individual and collective memory. As the map turns around in a spiral movement, you seem to move in, from one zone to another, toward the subject, but as you get closer, you begin to lose your bearings. In each zone, you explore the city differently. Four entrances, four ways of looking, four structural devices. You will always have, even as you move around, a fragmentary view, evoking a vast, more complete “hors-champ”, which always seems out of reach. You enter as if you were breaking in.

Mordre/Parenthèse

A journey through a living diary made up of video portraits and poetic texts through which the author reveals herself directly and unmasked. At once thought and scream, the CD-ROM PARENTHESE can only come to life through the user’s’ active exploration of images, words and sounds. PARENTHESE contains hidden words and interactive poetic games. It is up to you to discover them.

Haijin

HAIJIN invites you into a world where time has taken the time to pass, and where space is as infinite as the Japanese poetic imaginary. In this virtual space it is up to you to participate or to assist in the creation of haiku, a Japanese poetic form consisting of three phrases that expresses the quintessence of the contemplation of nature.

Of Shifting Shadows

A hypermedia tale of three fictional women — Bita, Mina and Goli — who experienced the 1979 Iranian Revolution through an exilic journey into memory and history. It combines storytelling, documentary narration, visual arts, performance and visual poetry in a highly creative and cohesively converged environment. In English and Farsi.

Exposition sauvage

Exposition Sauvage (Wild Exhibition) is an exhibition of images focusing on the thematic of “tools”, inspired by a definition in the 1976 Encylopædia Universalis. During the visit, you will discover twelve multimedia images the same way passersby and strollers had the chance to discover them when the works were previously exhibited in the streets of Paris.

Dialogue de sourds

How do the current means of communication change social behavior and modify our relationship with the world ? Dialogues de Sourds (Dialogue of the deaf) proposes a fictional view of communication based on the well-known fact that a living language is constantly changing. The viewer becomes the link between a conversation and 30 interactive spaces inhabited by gnomes.

In my Gash

Exploring the insides of a disturbed and disturbing girl raises memories to be played out on the surfaces of her organs. The sounds of suicide cycle endlessly in the black hole of despair that is found at her centre.

Voyage avec l’ange

Journey with the Angel is a interactive fiction mingling poetry and humour, visual delirium and symbolic tradition, musical and vocal creations. It’s in the company of Angel Gabriel, main character of this strange and enthralling adventure that we make the journey through imaginary universes populated by mythical beings.

The worst of Connanski

In a rather cynical way, the artist presents “chronicles of a contemporary, fundamentally pornographic society, shocking domestic performances, grating humour …”. He takes takes you over and questions on what you felt on seeing his images then carries you firther along your mutimedia «martyrdom». The Worst of Connanski is a non-interactive fiction on a unfriendly and semi-linear CD-ROM.

Shock in the Ear

Shock in the Ear is an experimental new media art work, which evokes the moment of shock and its aftermath, as a sensual experience. Mixing music and texts, from culture shock to electric shock and reverberating beyond into shock aesthetics, it resonates with deep and abrupt physical and physical and psychic change.

Beyond

Beyond is a myterious virtual world. In a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry, it explores the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction; the phonograph severing the voice from the body, photography capturing the soul and cinema resurrecting the dead.

Mauve Desert

MAUVE DESERT is a CD-ROM Translation of Nicole Brossard’s experimental novel Le Désert mauve. In this book, Mélanie is a fifteen year-old girl who seals her mother’s car every chance she gets and drives away from her mother’s lover Lorna and toward the dawn. Adriene Jenik is the road-running video artist who drives MAUVE DESERT from Montreal to the Southwest, from print to pixel, from night to day, from one generation of women to another.

Scrutiny in the Great Round

Scrutiny in the Great Round is a meditative collage of images and sounds; a wandering through our collective imagination. Eache scene is a painted animated landscape, embedded with symbols, artifacts, poetry and sounds from cultures and religions around the world. Episodes of he and she enduring the dramas of sex, marriage or birth are portrayed with a dream-like sensitivity.

Traces et contrastes

The visit unfolds according to an itinerary based on a subway map. Different stations placed along colored lines provide access to territories that evoke the symbolism of the places and lives of which they are a part. The emotional drift through this narrative and figurative journey engulfs one in the places of everyday life — the solid textures of walls, the atmosphere of time, the tangible traces of the past and present.

Technophobia

Technophobia is a collection of original multimedia art by12 international artists made as an interactive exhibition. The multimedia pieces play with our fears regarding technology, computers in particular, and thus raise questions about the very medium the artists are using. Technophobia manages to provide various angles on its subject, and at times the visual beauty of a work collides with fears surrounding technology. At best, the works featured on this CD-ROM demythologize our technophobia by making it concrete.

Mandate

The Montreal artist-run centre TOPO is a laboratory for digital writings and creations for web, performance, and installation spaces. Its mandate is to incubate, produce, and circulate original multimedia artworks that explore interdisciplinary and intercultural hybridizations in the digital arts.